


Who Is Harrison Wells?

by themagicalocelot



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, S01E19
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-06
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-04-03 03:23:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4084804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themagicalocelot/pseuds/themagicalocelot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Caitlin decides to confront Harrison about who he really is, and in this universe, Barry isn't there to stop her. Harrison tells her the truth, they talk about their feelings, and the night ends with her, wrapped underneath his arms and the warmth of his blankets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who Is Harrison Wells?

Harrison knew the price of keeping secrets. He knew that it would lead to heartbreak, pain, suffering, and the inevitable betrayal once everything had been unraveled. However, he never could have foreseen the incredible amount of loyalty a certain young woman would come to show towards him over time. It was baffling and admirable and heartwarming all at once, so when she shows up at his front door one night, the chances of it being fate as opposed to anything else, is something that he desperately wants to believe.

He knows why she’s here, knows about all the questions that need to be answered and the trust that needs to be regained. He can’t give her both those things, just one of them at the expense of the other, and he thinks she knows which one she’s more interested in, anyway.

“Please,” he says as they enter the living room. “Have a seat, Caitlin.”

She’s still looking around the place, as if she’s carefully examining every slab of stone, every marble tile, every inch of every window. Harrison doesn’t push her, but she eventually realizes that he’s been watching her and carefully sits down on the sofa in front of him.

“I— I wanted to talk,” she says, voice faltering as she fails to maintain eye contact with him.

She ends up looking away at the fireplace, with an incredulous look on her face. Harrison gives her another moment to regain herself before anything else, as her legs were shaking and she was already starting to sweat on her neck.

“Caitlin, you should know that before you say anything else, I don’t want you to feel like you have to hold back on certain things. You know you can always come to me for anything at all, no matter how big or small the matter may seem. That’s the way it has been, that’s the way it always will be,” Harrison says, leaning forward slightly in his chair as he tries to catch her gaze when she turns back.

Once she does, her eyes see right through him. “You’ve been lying to us.”

Harrison sighs. He takes off his glasses and starts wiping them on the hem of his shirt before putting them back on. He had prepared answers in the event of this happening, and he had them in his mind, but there’s something about the way Caitlin looks at him that fills him with shame, with regret, for all the things that he would so easily admit to any other person if confronted the same way.

“They’ve been telling me that you’re the Reverse Flash,” she continues, pressing her hands together. “I didn’t believe it at first, but then they started gathering evidence— real, tangible evidence, that was confusing but also hard to ignore at the time. Now it’s all just…”

She takes another breath, putting her face in her hands as she looks down between her legs. Harrison reaches out to touch her shoulder, gently stroking her arm as he mentally re-arranges the situation in his head.

“Caitlin, I never intended to hurt you,” he says as he looks up at her. “The truth is a long, and certainly complicated story, which may possibly be beyond your understanding of this world— this vast and alternate reality that all of you are currently living in.”

“Alternate reality?” she asks, finally looking back up, and Harrison can see the parts of her cheeks that were moist from the tears. “What are you talking about?”

He smiles at the thought of finally coming clean, the thought of finally being able to tell someone, tell her, about his life, identity, everything that has led him here, to this single moment in time with her.

“I am not from this time,” Harrison finally says. “I came from the future.”

Caitlin’s eyes grow wide, and her skin is turning paler as she stands up and walks over to the fireplace. “So they were right about you.”

“Depends on which part,” Harrison says. He doesn’t follow her in his wheelchair, doesn’t move at all in his seat until Caitlin makes him.

She turns back towards him. “That you’re not Harrison Wells. Who are you?”

Her face is a mixture of anger and fear, but mostly fear, and that is the last thing that Harrison would want Caitlin to associate him with. He may be dangerous, yes, but not to her. He’s always wanted to protect her, to save her from danger and to be the one constant in her life that she could always rely on.

He takes off his glasses and throws them onto the table next to him. He sees Caitlin flinch from the corner of his eye, and then turns towards her for the next part of their conversation.

“My name is Eobard Thawne, I was born a hundred and thirty six years from now, and I… travelled back in time only to find myself stranded here with virtually no means to return home.”

“But you found a way.” Caitlin continues. “You stole the body of the real Harrison Wells and built the particle accelerator to turn Barry into the Flash. Why?”

Harrison nods, chuckling lightly as he listens to her impressive attempt at putting the pieces together. Caitlin has always been the quickest thinker among the group. Cisco was brilliant in coming up with solutions for problems but Caitlin— Caitlin could cut open problems, tear them in half, and analyze them from a whole new perspective.

Which is why he’s surprised at how long it has took for her to figure this out, although, there may be other factors affecting her judgment.

“If you managed to figure out all of that yourself, I think you already know the answer to your question.”

She purses her lips and tries to avoid eye contact again. “I didn’t figure it out myself, those were just the theories that the others were discussing,” she mutters quietly.

“You’re not giving yourself enough credit,” Harrison replies. “Think about it. If I managed to travel back in time, what’s stopping me from going back there in a—”

“Flash,” she says, and Harrison watches something click in her brain at that exact moment. “You lost your speed. You need Barry for his speed so you can return home, which is why you’ve been training him, pushing him to go faster all this time.”

Harrison nods, with a satisfied look on his face. “Well done, Caitlin.”

“And you can walk?” she asks, eyes darting down to his legs, as if prompting him, challenging him, to get up on his feet.

He eventually stands, and the look of rage on her face only grows as he walks closer towards her. She closes herself off near the wall, and Harrison really doesn’t want to do this. He doesn’t want to be the one who frightens her out of all things.

“I know it might be difficult right now, but you can trust me,” Harrison says, extending an arm out.

“You’re unbelievable,” she replies, laughing in disbelief. She walks back to the couch and grabs her purse. “I really, really, hoped that I was wrong about you.”

The amount of time it takes for her to walk back to the front door is only a couple of seconds, but to Harrison those seconds are stretched out for as long as an eternity. Upon realizing that Caitlin isn’t about to stop to say goodbye, Harrison decides to zoom himself towards her at the door.

She jumps, and he tries his best to calm her down. “I’m not going to hurt you, Caitlin. I just want you to stay.”

“Why— would I ever do that?” she says, still clearly jarred from the flashes of red and the wind from the speed.

“Because I need you,” he replies, and the words come out as easily as it does when he finds himself telling her how brilliant she is, or how beautiful she looks every now and then, not that she isn’t beautiful all the time.

“I’ve been trapped here for fifteen long years, Caitlin. No friends, no family, and not even a name to validate my existence. You were one of the reasons that I was able to adjust to this world, the reason why sometimes… I forget that I had another home, because every time I spend time with you my mind just tricks itself into thinking that this, this is where home is.”

He takes a breath and tries to read the expression on her face. It’s dark in the room, so there’s not much hope for getting anything anyways.

“I won’t help you,” she finally says. “If your plan involves hurting Barry or anyone else.”

He huffs in amusement and looks away, partly because he doesn’t want her to see him lie, and partly because he feels ashamed of the man he really is.

“You promise me,” Caitlin says again, her voice growing stern.

He shakes his head and rubs his chin, with his head still looking down. “You know I can’t do that.”

Silence. He suspects that she hasn’t thought this through yet, and perhaps another wave of fear is starting to build up inside of her, despite all his attempts to assure her that he will never harm her.

“Caitlin,” he says, sighing as he turns his head back towards her at an angle. “I’ve only ever wanted to tell you the truth.”

She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes, pressing a hand against her forehead before eventually saying, “Okay.”

They walk back to the living room, and they sit in front of the fireplace. Harrison starts from the very beginning, from the day he was born. He talks about the future, and what it’s like, what it was like for him. He talks about the advancements in science and technology, and he could’ve sworn that he saw Caitlin’s eyes light up a couple of times during that part of the conversation.

The fireplace keeps them warm for the most part, but it’s a particularly cold night and the marble tiles are particularly chilly as well. Harrison eventually wraps an arm around her neck, and brings them a blanket that they share while he talks about the speed force and how he has lost his connection to it.

During one point in the conversation, Harrison gets carried away in the memory of the night of Nora Allen’s death, the lethal mixture of blind rage and most of all fear— the fear of never being able to return home, the fear that even when he finally does, everything might change and nothing would ever be the same. The same fear causes him to start vibrating all of a sudden, and in a sudden act of response Caitlin places a hand on his chest to calm him down.

He feels the cool touch of her hand, the gentle way she tells him to stop, while her eyes continue to scan his body in search of any other potential problems. Eventually, he manages to settle back into his normal state.

“How are you feeling?” she asks, and Harrison wants to laugh, because it’s such a simple question, yet he can’t seem to bring himself to give her a straight answer.

“Better,” he replies. “Better with you.”

She smiles at him for the first time tonight, and it isn’t filled with spite or incredulity, just all the warmth she has to offer for him. He can still see the hurt in her eyes, though, and he knows that it won’t take only one conversation to fix that. He wishes life was that simple, but he out of all people would know better by now.

“Thank you,” he says, cupping her face with one hand as he brushes her hair from her face. “For staying.”

“Thank you for being honest with me,” she says, moving closer towards him. He feels a hand resting on his lap, and for once it’s good to be able to acknowledge that touch and the electricity that runs through him whenever she’s around.

It’s the same type of electricity that allows him to fire nerve impulses at unimaginably high speeds, even surpassing the thought process of his brain. There are times when super speed leads to an overload in his nervous system, and involuntary reactions start taking over the voluntary ones. Like when he finds himself leaning into Caitlin, lips brushing against hers as he holds the back of her head and carefully kisses her, again and again.

He would imagine that Caitlin is going through the exact same thing, judging by how she’s already parting her lips in an attempt to push her tongue inside his mouth— to which, he most certainly obliges. They don’t stop kissing for a while, not until his lips are feeling numb and until she starts breathing in heavy, drawn-out pants.

Caitlin ends up having both hands tugging on his hair, as she pushes him back against the edge of the sofa while his arms are still wrapped around her waist. He can hear her fumbling with his belt underneath the blanket, and the sound of her knees sliding against the marble tiles beneath them.

He props her up in his lap until she’s fully straddling him, and then she actually touches him underneath and he can practically hear his moans echoing through the glass windows of his house. She manages to silence him with another kiss, and when he’s finally inside her the vibrations start again, and this time it’s her voice filling the walls of his house.

The speed has proven to be a very effective way of inducing pleasure that she has probably never felt before, and for him, just the feeling of her body wrapped up around his is enough to undo him in the blink of an eye. When it’s over, Harrison carries her to his room, where they can both enjoy the comfort of a proper bed, warmth, and the space to be themselves.

“Eobard?” she says in the middle of the night, stroking his head in her hand. “Is that what I should call you from now on?”

His eyes open as he looks at her, “Preferably not in front of the others.” He smiles, tracing his hand on the curve of her waist.

“Will you tell them eventually?” she asks, and Harrison can tell she’s being entirely earnest.

“You know I can’t promise you that.”

“So what can you promise?” Caitlin stops to look at him for a moment, a man that has been trying to earn back her trust, but for a lot of reasons cannot simply give her the things that she needs.

“I can promise that I’ll keep you safe,” Harrison replies. “And that I won’t lie to you ever again, and I can promise that you mean the world to me, Caitlin Snow. Without you, everything else in this universe is as dead to me as the stars in the city sky.”

She nods, not out of satisfaction, but a sense of understanding. She moves in closer towards him in the bed and snuggles close, burying her head in his chest as he holds the back of her hand and tells her one last time why in some ways, this universe has been more of a home to him than any other universe out there.


End file.
